After the snake hissed, a cloud’s indifference snapped
and Mother, buckets of you arrived, coiled as rain. At sea level,
you assembled chipped wreckage poking your left shoulder. Mother,
I forgive you for lending me shape, for cupping the bloom of a forlorn

stone into my sumptuous throat. I forgive you for forgiving me 
into the light I can’t bring myself to face. Mother, I curl into belated
shadow taking your name, it’s no longer embarrassing—I’m butterscotch
blight, dappled with the yolk of runny city lights, Mother, forgive me for I’m
	
insufferable rhyming trite, my face that curdled for years holy
milk tight, my teeth blotched with blood you parted with midflight.
Mother, I lived on hunger for so long, my appetite is a jarful of air. Spit
muscles into froth when antlers break tide on my pitch-dark yawn. Inside its

whorl, Mother—how did I deserve you? Forgive my clasping hand
plumbing phrases it derives, forgive this slow disciple, its attitudes of lust
descending down stairs, flummoxed, puffing, falling flat at the feet of prayer.



____

Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review and The Journal among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043 

I sat on the carpet and put my palms parallel to each other and I
carefully slid my right shoe on, carefully my left shoe. A silent wish
 
hit me. I sort of made a mental note so that the next time I see you I
can talk to you about it, but only if I figure out what specifically I was
 
wishing for, because  this is so frustrating  I don't know. Everything is only
that vague sad feeling. I crept around collecting keys and phone and as
 
I passed my dark reflection I thought  okay.  at how removed and cruel
I was, like a sick person who is cruel because they are so sick, which, as
 
anyone knows, makes sense. Nothing matters then. You do this, that, the
desperation fogs a little, you can sleep until it's time to do the first
 
whatever the next day, you stop caring which this or that way time
passes. The sidewalk took better care of me than any professional I
 
had seen, and the moon  it's bizarre that it once held humans  noticed
me mouthing words, though there was no one up there, no one anywhere, I
 
had gone hiding in the night. Even if there was someone, even if I was
soon to be snatched from the shadows  maybe life is meant to be that cruel.



Golden shovel: “I wish I was only as cruel as / the first time I noticed / I was cruel” – Kaveh Akbar



____

Lauren Bender lives in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in IDK Magazine, The Collapsar, Gyroscope Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Yes Poetry, and others. You can find her on twitter @benderpoet.

I will touch all the places
           along the shore
that were hidden
           to me. I will be tender
with the stones beneath my belly.
           Fish and crawfish
will swim in my hair.

I will receive
           the snow melt
and burst
           beyond where they thought
my place
           was, I will move
buildings, topple trees, bring mud
           rich with rot
onto the fields, it will be
           the same
as my former life, when
           they praise
me and
           curse me.

I will fall
           on my knees to reenter
the Mother, I will
           rise up to fall again
as rain, you
           will turn
your face to me and though
           it looks like weeping,
I will kiss you,
           nothing
between us
           at last.





____

Adrie Rose plays with words and plants in unceded Nonotuck territory. Her work has previously appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Nimrod, Underblong, Muzzle, and more.  She won the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, and the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize in 2021. Find her on Twitter @AdrieLovesPie.

What else would happen
to tawny down under blacklight
except colorize, tie dye, 
and astound? 

Elysian fields gotta bloom
somewhere. Except to say
that humans made Elysium up,
sending our measly derricks 
plumb down— 
and springhares invented this:
secret libraries erected
in open air, paper-marbled
volumes spiraled sky high
from ground to 
whiskered cornice. 

My life had stood a pastoral
poem green and pristine.
Undiscovered glens 
waiting for a hippie
with a tab to find them
or a medicine woman 
with mortar and pestle
to grind them.

Here I am, a child of the ‘80s
just biding One Day at a Time,
waiting for Schneider,
my building’s hapless super,
to show up sheepishly
wielding the ultimate boon:
one bulb of black light. 

Meanwhile, springhares wear
Jupiter’s clouds as hidden
skin and platypuses
have settled in, gliding past 
permission and pictures.
They’re out here living—
disco ball dancing 
to music subdermal, 
platypussing through
midnight water, 
emerging beaded in
flamboyant kit. 

River-glittered Janus,
dancer at a rave, she
knows it’s last call,
boogies on her plot,
bucks up her bill,
and shoots her shot.
I want to go
with her. 

I want to go.
To a place where what
swirls beneath
our surface
is only: 
                         B	E	T	T	E	R
Signifying
nothing other than fuck it—
let’s be beautiful in this tangle
of roots together. 

In darkness, I watch
her bright body streak, 
course, and dart.

Her expression flickers.
I’m a mirror.
What’s here is there,
within, without.

Whether we’re
ENOUGH 
is an absurd question.
Head to toe, we’re animals
efflorescent—
bodypainted in poetry
underneath
selfsame coats.



____

L.J. Sysko’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Ploughshares, BEST NEW POETS, Radar, Limp Wrist, SWWIM Every Day, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among others. BATTLEDORE, poems of early motherhood, was published as a chapbook in 2017 (Finishing Line Press). A 2022 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Thomas Lux Scholar, Sysko has been honored with both Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowships; her poetry has twice been shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize, judged by Billy Collins, and has earned finalist recognition from Marsh Hawk Press and The Pinch, among others. She is a reader for The Common and a Delaware State Arts Council board member; she can be found online at ljsysko.com.

Beauty’s feeling fugitive
furtive and sallow
in her bathrobe 
standing ragged
at the fridge

Wisdom peers in
like an owl perched 
on a midnight limb—
once she was Madame X in her dark dress,
vamp with a raptor’s eye,
aloof to
matters mundane as
dinner until 
they slithered 
suggestively
by—

Now, silence strings itself
on a necklace 
between them
as fragile as life. 
Calendar pages
fold into pearls
hoping to surf 
on Beauty’s shell

or, failing that,
to try once more
for Wisdom’s attention—
bills, bones, teeth
coughed up as a pellet



____

L.J. Sysko’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Ploughshares, BEST NEW POETS, Radar, Limp Wrist, SWWIM Every Day, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among others. BATTLEDORE, poems of early motherhood, was published as a chapbook in 2017 (Finishing Line Press). A 2022 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Thomas Lux Scholar, Sysko has been honored with both Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowships; her poetry has twice been shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize, judged by Billy Collins, and has earned finalist recognition from Marsh Hawk Press and The Pinch, among others. She is a reader for The Common and a Delaware State Arts Council board member; she can be found online at ljsysko.com.

No language.
             Just late morning light
glazed in the hairs on your
                        skin, set in the sweat

of my pillow. I don’t need
            you to brush your teeth—
in fact, I don’t need you
                        to get up at all; I have

practiced poise for this
            like I practice music.
There’s a string section
                        of dust motes passing

in front of the window
            as the cat walks across the sill.
Each pawprint a syllable
                        in a word I dare not say,

or a record of what happens
            here. Of what wasn’t heard.
No need for consonance;
                        I quarter-rest next to you all

            morning waiting for the coda,
bring the reed to my lips
            before our bodies' chorus.



____

Jacob Rivers is the author of the chapbook Eros the Length of a Sentence. He manages a global humanities network at The Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, and lives in Hudson, NY.

Last night you dreamed you could drink up all the air
            between maple branches and moonshine.

It tasted of hemlock tips, resinous furring
            sour and then bitter as the green underside

of sea ice approaching a country made
            of narrow rain.

Who will smell the twist of oil behind your ear,
            who will sigh against your morning?

Who will ask, where have you been?



____

Carolyn Oliver (she/her) is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, forthcoming 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. Carolyn is the winner of the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. Online: carolynoliver.net. 

Owls on either side of the house
in the coolest hour of a summer night

                                         when I wake to bend and draw
                                         up the sheet at the foot of the bed—

relay, pause, relay, then move on a little
further. I track them, one with each ear,

                                         owls in stereo, and then follow
                                         the zippering rasp of their fledglings

into the same dark, branch by branch.
I wait until the air has stilled once more

                                         before stretching, elbows pointed
                                         away from my ribs, letting a small

sigh that won’t wake you escape, and wonder
what on Earth I would ever do without you.



____

Michael Metivier (he/him) is a writer, editor, and musician living in Vermont. His work has appeared in EcoTheo Review, LAAB, jubilat, Crazyhorse, and African American Review, among other journals, and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and Northern Woodlands.

After a drought the ground
must accept what the ground

can accept before the creek
can fill, for the creek

is not a gutter, but permeable.
Consider this first storm preamble

one soon forgets but nevertheless
establishes theme. . . unless it never

rains again, in which case
it is coda, the creek: a crease.


___

Michael Metivier (he/him) is a writer, editor, and musician living in Vermont. His work has appeared in EcoTheo Review, LAAB, jubilat, Crazyhorse, and African American Review, among other journals, and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and Northern Woodlands.

I dropped into your white dream like a drunk lost bat, 
only days after you dropped out of mine. 

The titanium light-room littered with banquet tables, 
draped in white like a Last Supper Bingo event, 

one where Jesus and the apostles went missing.
The intense light came from an unseen place, 

everything a glowing shock of x-ray.
Your spare littering of possessions, a humble display,

the church sale no one showed up for, including you.
Helen Reddy was ready, her relics spread over a table, 

your weird little secret, one of many. Autographed LPs, 
stashed in a pink gift box, her toothy smile 

leaping with confidence, like deer tails, off the covers. 
I touched them. You appeared next to my shoulder like magic, 

tall and vibrant, my height, smiling, happier than I’d ever seen you. 
You assured me you were fine with your olive, sparkling eyes. 

Your black shock of hair, a Rorschach nest splashed against 
the white shout of everywhere canvas.

“It’s waiting, you said,” without moving your lips, 
speaking about Harold’s tricked-out, Jaguar hearse.

You would have to go out some strange way—in Max style.
Red taillights glowed against wet black asphalt, unfurling 

from the edge of a brightly lit holy Jesus-Free Bingo Hall, 
into your shimmering, satiny, starlit sky.

Mist rose from twin tailpipes like cigarette smoke, 
and then you were gone.



____

Koss is a queer writer and artist with an MFA from SAIC. She has work in or forthcoming in Diode Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Kissing Dynamite, Five Points Anti-Heroin Chic, North Dakota Review, Feral, Chiron Review, Prelude, Lunch Ticket, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Feral, Lumiere, Rat’s Ass Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Her website is http://koss-works.com.